Making Use of Word-based Features inyour research
Michael C Gizzi ( mgizzi@gmail.com mgizzi@ilstu.edu)
This session explores how you can take advantage of word-based features in yourwork, focusing on Word Explorer, a tool that aids in identifying concepts, auto-coding,refining codes and more throughout the research process.
Word-based features cover a lot of territory in MAXQDA, from text searches toMAXDictio functions such as word frequencies, word combinations, keywords incontext, word matrix browser, and dictionary-based content analysis. It brings togetherthe powers of a text search function with all of these options in one place, providing a
one-stop tool to see the way words and phrases appear in your data, and to easily findsegments and auto-code search results.
What does Word Explorer do?
o It lets you contextualize the usage of specific words or phrases in documents,
codes, code comments, memos, and paraphrases
oIdentify the context words and phrases are used in combination withoSelect any element to see the actual underlying data, and use auto-code tools

How to access Word Explorer.
Go to Analysis > Word Explorer

Or highlight a segment of text in a document, right click and select “Explore in WordExplorer“Contrasting Text Search and Word Explorer
The classic tool to search words in MAXQDA is Text Search (formerly known as Lexical
search in prior versions). Both tools are in the Analysis menu. As an example, let’s takethe phrase “original content“ and search it first in Text Search & Auto-code.

You select words or phrases,
and then choose options suchas “in documents, comments,memos, paraphrases“
You can limit the results towhole words, case-sensitivity,
base form (lemmatization),and activateddocuments/codes.

The search creates a search results window, that shows each segment of text found,and provides the ability to auto-code segments.

Text Search is quite powerful and provides numerous ways to search, but whencontrasted with Word Explorer, we can see how the latter will search words andphrases in a way that goes beyond a
simple text search.
The default use of the tool provides alist of all results, in terms of hits,
documents, document groups, sets,
as well as where the search term isfound in memos, coding comments,summaries, and paraphrases.
It also shows most frequent
documents, codes, word
combinations, and context words.
From there you can see the actual search results, activate documents, or view coded
segments.
The one thing Word Explorer can’t do that Text Search & Autocode can, is to a complex
search with multiple search terms. For example, if you have data in which a phrase like“pull forward“ is also written as “pull-forward,“ Text Search could have two separate
search items to collect both results.

This will provide all of the segments meeting both versions of the term.

Word Explorer – A look at features.

Options:
1. Only activated documents or codes Narrow the search to activated documents orcodes. This is useful if you want to only search a subset of your data
2. Most Frequent. Choose how many results you want to show up for results in thecategories of most frequent documents, codes, word combinations, and context words.
Range is from 3 to 50.
3. Case Sensitivity. Choose if you want the results regardless of capitalization.
4. Starting Letters. This is useful if you want to get more than literal word results. For
example, if you use the word “bundle“ as a whole word, you would not get bundles orbundling. If you search for “bundl“ with Starting Letters, the results will include allwords that start with those words.

5. Find whole words. This is the inverse of Starting letters. It will produce results forjust the exact word you are searching on. If Find whole words and Case Sensitivity ison, it will further narrow the results.
6. Base Form. Also known as lemmatization, base form is a very useful option that willcount words from the same stem together. For example, if you search for the word
“give,” Word Explorer will include occurences of give, gave, or given. Base form iscurrently available for 14 languages. Make sure you select the proper language with thedrop-down box.
7. Stop List. Selecting this option will use either a generic or customized stop list. A setof uninteresting words , for example, words such as to or and, or the, which you wish toexclude from the Word Explorer results. When you check this option, you need tospecify which stop list to use. The stop list can be edited in MAXDictio > Stop Lists.
There is an “english_complete” stop list available from the MAXQDA Help program forthe feature.
8. Ignore numbers. This will only return text and not numbers in word combinations
containing a number and context words consisting only of a number will not be output.
But numbers entered in the search “explore” field are never ignored.

Advanced Options

There is a second tab of advanced options. These include:
1. Context Words (before/after) [number 1-15] – here you can set the maximum
number of context words that will be considered before and after the search hit. By
default, 3 words before and after search hit are considered as long as they belong tothe same sentence.
2. Ignore hashtags, email addresses, and hyperlinks. These check boxes let youchoose to ignore hash tags, email addresses, and hyperlinks from results.

Using Word Explorer
Lets take the example “pull forward” and process it through Word Explorer, selecting
Select whole words. We do not need base form or stop lists enabled.

This tells us that there are 19
hits for the term, in 11
documents. The phrase
appears in one coding
comment and 1 summary.
It then also tells us thedocuments where the phrase
occurs most frequently, as
well as the most frequent
coded segments the phrase
occurs within.

If you scroll down in the word explorer window, you can also see the most frequent
word combinations and context words. Compared with a Text Search, Word Explorer isproviding us with a comprehensive look at where our search terms occurs and its
context. It draws on the tools of MAXDictio as well.

Let’s click on the “In Documents” result of 19 hits. This provides us with a search result.

If we wanted to we could easily autocode that search result with a new code for “pullforward“ by clicking on autocode. This would let us choose to code with an existingcode or create a new one.

We can also eliminate search results that are either irrelevant or ones we do not want
to include by single clicking the “=“ icon in the left most column to exclude it. A stop
icon will occur. Or we could highlight individual rows and use the same ignore iconfrom the menu.

Finally, we can use the activate documents containing the search results icon if we wantto just use those for analysis.
Looking at results “in mywriting“ will not produce
search results, butinstead the coded
segments that match theterm. For example, thisimage shows us thesegment and thecomment with the wordpull forward.

When we click on any of ther Word Explorer
windows, we will also see options in the righthand corner to save the results to a QTT
worksheet, copy and image of the results, ordisable that particular tool.
If we select the Send to QTT worksheet, we canspecify what worksheet to use, and it willtransfer the information that worksheet. You can
open it and add insights or notes from Analysis >QTT

Please note, though, in QTT, the results are just an image, and not interactive like they
are in the Word Explorer window.

Conclusion
Word Explorer is a powerful tool that brings together several MAXQDA features andcan be used as a way to explore your data, search for specific terms, and even autocode data.
It is a great MAXQDA feature to use if you are developing a dictionary of terms to use in
a MAXDictio Dictionary-based content analysis. It does have a few limits, such as theability to only search on one set of words or phrases and not do complex boolean
lexical searches. But it offers the user so much more by letting you see the whole
picture of how a word or phrase appears in your project.
Word explorer is also a great feature to use when you identify a new code half-way
through your coding process. Using a series of word explorer searches can help you goback to prior documents (activate those first) and look for relevant passages that would
fit the new code.
For more examples of how to use Word Explorer, I’d recommend you
download a free copy of The Practice of Qualitative Data Analysis With
MAXQDA: Research Examples Using MAXQDA, Volume 2 from MAXQDAPress. Then read chapter 3, “Using MAXQDA for Dictionary-Based ContentAnalysis: An Example Exploring the Business Strategy of Netflix OverTime.“ In this chapter word explorer is described and used several times.

For More information contact. Dr. Michael Gizzi,
Certified MAXQDA Trainer
https://www.4stagesofresearch.com mgizzi@ilstu.edu or mgizzi@gmail.com